The company Tuesday released upgrades to its iWork office suite for iPad adding new features and showing that it's going to put up a fight and not cede the iOS office app space to the 800 pound guerrilla from Redmond. Pages, ($9.99, App Store), Numbers ($9.99, App Store), and Keynote ($9.99, App Store) were revised to version 2.2 adding several new features, most notably a read-only mode allowing documents to be shared without granting editing permission to the recipient, and numerous enhancements to the editing UI.

The improvements to iWork for iOS correspond to changes made to iWork for iCloud made at the same time. 9to5Macreports that Pages, Numbers and Keynote for iCloud (still in beta) received improved sharing options, enhanced editing UIs and support for Retina displays. Like their iOS counterparts All three web apps have been updated with the ability to share read-only documents and to open documents directly from iCloud Mail.

While the changes are welcome additions, will they be enough to slow down the momentum being generated by Office for iPad? Will Microsoft consume all the oxygen in the Office app space?

Jason D. O'Grady developed an affinity for Apple computers after using the original Lisa, and this affinity turned into a bona-fide obsession when he got the original 128 KB Macintosh in 1984.
He started writing one of the first Web sites about Apple (O'Grady's PowerPage) in 1995 and is considered to be one of the fathers of blogging....
Full Bio

Disclosure

Jason D. O'Grady is the creator and editor of O'Grady's PowerPage, which has been publishing mobile technology news since 1995. He maintains an advertising relationship with the following legacy advertisers on the PowerPage: Amazon Associates and Google Adsense. Advertising on the PowerPage is brokered by a third-party agency (BackBeat Media) and he recuses himself from these negotiations.